"A Neurocognitive Approach to Music Reading"

A Neurocognitve Approach to Music Reading by Lauren Stewart
Dep. of Imaging Neuroscience
University College, UK and University of Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7 RU, UK

The article, which I highly recommend, investigates how musical symbols are decoded into music response (perceptual and physical) for pianists reading 2 staves.
They found that pianists eyes perform a set of horizontal and vertical mappings. (There was no mention of what kind of "zig-zag or "mapping" is more efficient).
Adults musically untrained who were taught to play the piano for 3 months showed a change in the superior parietal cortex. The experiment was monitored by MRIs.
The author states that these changes correspond to "the acquisition of of a process that deals with the extraction of spacial (pitch) and featural (rhythm) properties of notation, respectively".
The neuroimaging were focused on reading musical pitch, which for pianists is a spacial task (where high notes correspond to the right side of the keyboard and lower notes correspond to
the leftside). However, the study showed that music reading also involves recognizing the rhythms (when to play).
These rhythmic instructions, differ from the pitch instructions because they are not spacial but they are conveyed by visul features.
The imaging tests for rhythm recognition also showed changes on the left supermarginal gyrus.
The conclusions were:
"The studies described above reveal that music reading, at least for keyboard performance, requires coordinated sensorimotor translation between a set of vertically organized stimuli and a horizontally organized set of responses. These spatial mappings, which are likely to relate to the decoding of pitch from notation, develop in the early stages of skill acquisition and are associated with functional changes in the superior parietal cortex. The ability to decode the rhythmic elements of notation, by contrast, appears to depend upon a visual discrimination process subserved by the fusiform gyrus. These “what” and “when” aspects of music reading seem to map onto the what and when occipitoparietal and occipitotemporal streams, respectively".